I see their points, but it’s not something that bothers me. That’s what science fiction does, to my mind. We take an aspect of our world, exaggerate it to an extreme, and attribute it to aliens or “future humans” or the post-apocalypse. “What would happen if…?” So maybe we posit “women rule the world” and maybe the answer is the placid, baffling (to the men) matriarchy of Herland, or the broken dystopia of Women’s Country.
I’ve always attributed the “we totes cured the gays” part to laziness more than malice. I think she needed pure heterosexuality for her plot to work, and that was the easiest solution. Instead of trying to write in women who actually didn’t give a damn about the men and vice versa. I think she equally could have ignored the issue; lots of science fiction does, but it came into her head as a problem and she felt the need to deal with it.
My husband got almost halfway through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall before turning to me and saying “There’s only one male character in this book that doesn’t suck.” A few chapters later he was like “…that’s probably the point, isn’t it?”
